Theatre
Porgy and Bess (Covent Garden) Post-Mortem (King's Head)
Nunn better
Sheridan Morley
In the current Covent Garden pro- gramme for Porgy and Bess there is an open letter from Jeremy Isaacs in which he thanks Sir George Christie of Glynde- bourne for 'the chance to bring Gershwin's masterpiece to Covent Garden'. He might perhaps have moved the apostrophe to allow for Ira's lyrics as well as George's music, but about this being a masterpiece there can now be little doubt, thanks large- ly to the staging of Trevor Nunn (I shall naturally leave all musical comment to my colleague Rupert Christiansen).
And we should not perhaps be too eager to blame the ROH for having taken just 57 years to recognise the masterpiece, given that even in New York the Met only got around to it for the first time in 1957, such has been the deep racial and showbiz uneasiness surrounding the opera since it first appeared in 1935. Yet other questions could well be asked of both the Glynde- bourne and the ROH directors. Did it real- ly require six whole years to move this show the 50 or so miles from Glynde- bourne to Covent Garden, and would it not have been a great deal better to have offered it to a commercial house such as the Old Vic, where Carmen Jones has hap- pily been playing eight capacity perfor- mances a week these last 18 months? To repeat this definitive Porgy six years late, for only a dozen performances at £100 a ticket, seems to me to be asking for yet 'Oh, all right. You can lower band.' be in the more public frustration at a time when the ROH can ill afford it. But for we few, we happy few, who are actually able to see it (Mr Isaacs will doubtless plead a concert staging in Birmingham next month, and then the chance of television, but these are scarcely the same) the news is nothing but ecstatic.
Nunn's great genius as a director, here as in Les Miserables and the RSC Nicholas Nickleby and even such flops as The Baker's Wife, has always lain in his ability to create a community in which you feel you might almost have lived, and the tragedy of this Porgy's mass unavailability is that it denies most theatregoers something more than just the chance to hear the greatest score written in America this century. Its limited run also denies them the chance to see how Nunn has re-thought it, from the way he lifts Porgy out of the usual dogcart and on to crutches, only to have him throw those away too in the final lurch toward Bess and her promised land, wherever that might be. This is the score that showed the way for- ward to Rodgers-Hammerstein and Sond- heim in its great mix of spiritual soul and Broadway big band, and what Nunn has achieved is a re-working and a re-thinking of the original, so instead of a faintly patro- nising white trip down South it becomes a soaring affirmation of the life of Catfish Row and its potential for survival against all odds. The performances here of Willard White and Cynthia Haymon in the title roles, Damon Evans as Sporting Life and Gregg Baker as Crown form the most pow- erful dramatic and musical quartet in town. Up at the King's Head, that theatre's rare talent for digging around the archives of pre-war playwrights and songwriters brings us the first ever professional staging of Noel Coward's Post-Mortem, written at some speed in 1930 when Noel had just been playing Journey's End with a local repertory company in Singapore. On his voyage home (one which had already Pro- duced Private Lives) Coward began to think about R.C. Sherriffs play, and what had happened to the world for which its heroes had fought the war to end all wars. He reached the conclusion that the 1920s had been a total betrayal of all their ideals, and wrote in a matter of days this furiou5,.111- focused but still fascinating polemic agains,t church and state and the sophisticated soci- ety which had already made him its favourite play-boy of the West End world.. What matters about Post-Mortem noW is the light it throws on Coward's fascination with dreams and death (later to lead 111.01 on to both Shadow Play and Blithe Sprit) and his forward-looking techniques, almost filmic, for getting audiences through our and space. Richard Stirling's production Is at best adequate, but there are strong Per- formances from Harry Burton as the doomed officer and Sylvia Syms as th.e mother who alone comes to understand his disillusioned rage against the dying of 50 many lights.
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